Economic conditions had in the first place transformed the mass of the people into workers. The domination of capital created the common situation and common interests of this class. Thus this mass is already a class in relation to capital, but not yet a class for itself. In the struggle, of which we have only indicated a few phases this mass unites and forms itself into a class for itself. The interests which it defends become class interests. But the struggle between classes is a political struggle.

Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847

In their different ways the two articles which follow (Capitalism's New Normal and Class Composition in the Crisis) contribute to an overview of the situation of the working class at its most fundamental: the world of work. The first is the slightly longer original of a piece we published in the autumn edition of our broadsheet Aurora. It is basically an expression of solidarity with fast food delivery drivers who are battling to secure a consistent living wage. The coming together of these ‘gig’ economy workers to fight for their mutual interest – better terms for the sale of their labour power – confirms the Marxist perspective that the elementary class struggle between bosses and workers does not go away. For all the talk about the disappearing working class within post-industrial capitalism, a substantial part of the modern ‘precariat’ are proving that they too are part of that class, albeit a class with a substantially different profile. There can hardly be a clearer demonstration of this than Uber and Deliveroo drivers’ quest to be officially classed as wage earners (not self-employed) by the state’s employment tribunals.

That said, it is an illusion to assume that all the working class has to do now to assure a bright tomorrow is combine together to force the employers to rein in the worst aspects of exploitation. It is true that today’s global workforce is the product of decades of capitalist restructuring: with new generations of proletarians in the periphery and new kinds of work set-ups where workers must learn how to organise and resist. But the principal reason today’s working class is having to relearn elementary aspects of self-organisation is that decades of trade union struggles have proved worse than useless in the face of employers and governments set on “doing whatever it takes” to counteract their profitability crisis. If the number of work days lost due to strikes can be taken as a guide to working class ‘combativity’ then the latter was at its height in post-war Britain in 1979 – the year that Thatcher became Prime Minister, and the UK’s Office of National Statistics recorded almost 29.5 million “working days lost”. ⁽¹⁾ Now, with the world capitalist crisis well into its fourth decade, and the working class throughout the ‘advanced’ capitalist world receiving a steadily diminishing share of the value they generate the same Office recorded a historic low of 170,000 strike days in the UK in 2015. This is roughly the same picture as the rest of the old capitalist heartlands.

So it is not just about the working class in Britain, or even about the essentially conservative and constraining force of the trade unions, it is about the fact that the capitalism is in deep crisis. Not only can there be no return to anything like the conditions of the post-war boom, but even the most determined fight back by any group of workers cannot alter the fact that one way or another (sacking workers and replacing them with robots or moving to another area with lower wage rates; reducing wages, sickness benefits, pensions; obliging workers to work harder for the same pay, etc, etc.) the capitalists will claw back any concessions in their efforts to extract more unpaid labour from the workforce as a whole. The outlook for the future within capitalism is dire, and not simply on the jobs front. Yet, for all the millions of strike days lost and the tenacity of many of the sectional battles fought, if the lost decades of the working class have anything to teach us it is that the revolutionary struggle to get rid of capitalism in favour of a society of “freely associated producers” does not emerge from battles over ‘bread and butter’ issues.

In short, the struggle for communism is not only about willingness to fight but about political consciousness and political consciousness comes from a wider perspective than the workplace. As the second article, Class Composition in the Crisis, notes “giving everything you have during a fight with the class enemy is in some ways exemplary” but there is something disingenuous, or at least naïvely mistaken, about a political organisation whose perspective is that an autonomous, determined economic struggle will lead to the overthrow of capitalism.

It is one thing to reject the practice of gaining a foothold in the workplace in order to gather recruits for social democratic/Labour unions, another to avoid the political task of putting forward a wider political perspective which is essential if the working class is to take up the struggle for a new world.

For all the change in its composition, the working class is discovering new ways to fight. What the class struggle needs now is a clear vision of the goal that is worth fighting for and a clear programme, based on the historical experience of the class, about how to get there. It is up to those who understand this to work together with the aim of joining forces in a single revolutionary political organisation to counter the influence of capitalist ideology, whatever form it takes, inside the class as a whole.

Notes:

(1) ons.gov.uk